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Something had been creeping up on Aizawa all week now.
He flew out of country for his job often enough and he took his partners with him if he could manage it (always either both or neither, lest he show any favoritism, and neither leaving Matsuda home alone nor being consistently alone with him was his preferred choice), but this was a different case. It happened, every once in a while — the new L (he wasn’t exactly new anymore, but Aizawa wasn’t sure if he’d ever stop thinking of him that way) would get in contact with them and request assistance on a case. It was always their hands that he needed use of, not their brains, but Aizawa had lost the will to protest it by now. He would have been more willing to argue it once, and he had nearly regained the will a couple years back; then C-Kira had disappeared and the resignation had returned.
Whatever the case, those ventures were generally localized within Japan. This was an exception. Everything was over and done with now, and Mogi and Yamamoto had departed back to Japan that morning. The three of them remained for another couple of days — still under the guise of official duty, of course, but they had far more free time than any of them would admit. The other two knew as much, but not saying anything unnecessary was an establishing trait of Mogi’s, and Yamamoto had their backs, he was sure.
Besides, they deserved the time off together. It was Ide who had needed convincing, in the end.
The restaurant door swung shut behind them and Aizawa averted his eyes purposefully from the harsh glow of the streetlights looming above them. The orange hue felt of winter just as much as the icy breeze sweeping down the sidewalk — less strongly than it could have, all things considered. The streets of D.C. were still a maze to him, but Ide seemed to understand them well enough, and the air was still for a winter night.
“I swear, everything is bigger in America,” Ide muttered from in front of him, feet already setting out down a direction that they had decided on before dinner but Aizawa had trusted him to remember well enough to forget himself. He might sound like he was grumbling complaints to anyone else, but Aizawa can detect a note of awe in his voice. “I could barely fit that burger in my fucking mouth.”
“Hideki, there are so many places I could go with that, you don’t even know,” Matsuda interjected loudly, his grin just a bit too wide. “I think you just like setting up for lewd jokes.”
Ide scoffed. “I actually do have a shred of common decency, Touta. I don’t know where you get this warped image of me from.”
“I can think of a few places, actually,” Aizawa commented, raising his eyebrows in Ide’s direction.
The younger man’s ears reddened significantly, and somehow he doubted it was due to the cold. “Both of you need to stop victimizing me.”
“I’ll stop if you buy me hot chocolate!” Matsuda piped back up.
“I’m already taking you to the toy store, Touta.”
“And you’ll buy me hot chocolate afterwards!”
He was a peppy guy under normal circumstances, but superficiality was practically radiating off the man and Aizawa could feel it. Ide could, too, judging from how practically huddled he was to his boyfriend's side. It was cold enough to not seem too strange, but Aizawa knew how anxious Ide was with public affection — and besides, he’d normally be at least a little apologetic for leaving Aizawa out. He could see the strain in Matsuda’s smile without looking at it; it’d been there all night. The reason was obvious, when he thought about it.
January twenty-eighth was a special date.
That was what had been creeping up on him all week. It’d been five years and it didn’t feel as bad as it used to but it still didn’t fucking feel good. It was just strange, that’s what it was — he felt melancholic, he felt anxious, he felt happy all at once. He was with the people who he loved more than anything (except his children, of course, but they were back home, and he trusted them with Eriko despite their separation and overall rocky relationship), he felt comfortable being with them like this, he knew he should feel like the future was certain, but he didn’t — he didn’t, but he was certain about the past, and the past had committed enough crimes already.
For a moment, he thought very clearly that Ukita should be there with them — if not in D.C., then in Japan, with Mogi and Yamamoto. He wondered what he was feeling now, if he felt anything. He wasn’t distressed; thinking about it didn’t upset him anymore, and he didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe it meant that he had finally grown up.
He was content with it.
They arrived to the toy store just in the nick of time; Ide, for his part, had tried to get his companions out and about earlier in the day, but of course Matsuda had protested, and so they had found their way to the shop mere minutes before closing. He propped a door open with his shoe and slipped his phone into his pocket (the Maps app on his phone had provided a personal navigator this entire time, a fact that seemed to elude Aizawa entirely) after sparing a brief glance to the time and date.
He had come to terms with what today meant, by historical standards and by personal ones. Ide was far more worried about Matsuda’s wellbeing than his own — last year’s anniversary had been a fiasco, especially since it was Aizawa’s first time with them like that and he had been entirely unaware of how serious the issue was.
He hadn’t felt morally conflicted over the Kira case for years now; if he had nightmares about it still, it was the feeling of helplessness, the grasping possibility of death that terrified him. He couldn’t say the same for Matsuda. Maybe that was why he was letting the youngest member of their trio drag him around D.C. like some sort of rag doll. A rag doll that would buy him presents.
“I stopped, didn’t I, Hideki?” Matsuda asked after stepping into the store ahead of him, sparing a teasing glance back. Something about the look in his eyes pulled knots at Ide’s stomach. “You have to get me hot chocolate after this.”
“Yeah, yeah, fine. Believe whatever you want.” He matched the other man’s joking tone to the best of his ability, but it still came out dryer than he meant it. Matsuda pouted at him but continued into the store, and Ide glanced anxiously up to Aizawa.
“Things should be fine as long as we keep an eye on him,” the taller man murmured into his ear, and Ide had to stifle a shudder. Normally he’d be the one doing the reassuring — at least, when Matsuda was involved — but he found himself comforted nonetheless.
“Hideki! Come look at this!”
Ide glanced over to where Matsuda was calling his name — somehow, he had managed to travel a good several meters across the store within the few moments Ide and Aizawa’s exchange had lasted. Moreover, he was struggling to dismount a particularly large stuffed bear from an equally tall shelf.
Ide sighed heavily, although he was really more amused than anything else; Matsuda’s childishness still caught him off guard sometimes, but he was glad that he retained it. There had been a time when he wasn’t so sure it would come back, and he was grateful enough for its presence to immediately make his way over to his boyfriend’s side.
“What is it?”
“I want this one.”
The bear was finally dislodged from the shelf and fell heavily to Matsuda’s feet. Ide sighed again and added, in what he thought was a joking tone, “Come on, Touta, do you really expect me to buy this thing for you? Stop being so childish.”
Then Matsuda started crying.
Ide almost didn’t detect it at first, but after five years of devoting himself to the extensive job that was monitoring Matsuda’s health, he caught on fairly quickly. The other man had his back turned to him and was suddenly oddly silent but Ide could see that slight trembling to his shoulders, and then it all fit together and he found himself rushing to Matsuda’s side.
“I’m sorry,” was the first thing that forced its way out of Ide’s mouth, and he moved his hands to grip at Matsuda’s shoulder. In all the time they’d been dating, he had never been the cause of this sort of breakdown; Aizawa had once he was pulled in, and Ide had never realized how that felt. Now the guilt was all slamming into him at once, rough and cold. “I didn’t mean that. I’ll get it for you, don’t worry, I…”
“I — I’m not — ” Matsuda’s tears had been silent at first, presence stated only through visibility, but then he was sobbing, gasping for air at random intervals and scrubbing desperately at his eyes and audibly sniffling. Ide struggled to find comforting words (because dammit, of course they weren’t coming the one time he needed them the most, naturally) but before he could Matsuda was sobbing again, was practically wailing, was banging the palm of his hand down on the shelf —
And then Aizawa’s hand was on his shoulder and the world skidded to a halt. Ide glanced up at him to find the other man’s gaze, anxious and decisive, set on Matsuda and then Aizawa was between them and Ide suddenly felt very small and very much like he had failed at something very important.
He wished the Chief was still alive. The late Yagami patriarch had been better at handling Matsuda than any of them had been (except maybe Light, but he couldn’t bring himself to think of that), had been a pillar of diligence and bravery and strength more than any of them. It had been just like him to sacrifice himself. Ide abruptly, very desperately, needed someone to look to.
Aizawa picked the catalyst for all this off the ground where it had fallen and looked to Ide sympathetically. “I’ll go buy this. Stay with Matsuda.”
Matsuda accepted the stuffed bear when Aizawa offered it back to him, but it didn’t make him feel any better — of course it didn’t. He clutched it to his chest, trembling and with deathly tight fingers, but its presence barely registered; Ide’s arms pressed tentatively against him fared little better.
He should have felt ashamed or humiliated to have broken down sobbing in public — over an offhand comment about a fucking teddy bear, no less — probably would have, if the circumstances were different. Then again, if the circumstances were different, he wouldn’t have broken down in the first place. The whole thing must have been coincidental, but it was too coincidental — that Near (not L, Matsuda would never think of him as L) would call for their help so close to the meeting date five years ago, that he would find himself misplaced with two of the people who had witnessed by his side the death of a god, who had physically restrained his own misguided attempts at exacting revenge upon this same god — and no, maybe Light wasn’t a god, maybe Kira wasn’t a god, but Matsuda had treated him like one, hadn’t he? It was personal, too personal, more personal than any of Kira’s droves of everyday worshippers, and far different in nature, but Light had been so much, had represented those unattainable positive qualities that Matsuda lacked, and he wished now that he had been less awed by him and more envious, because maybe then he wouldn’t have cared when those qualities turned to dirt.
He had hated Light for a while after the warehouse, when he wasn’t busy hating himself. He still did, sometimes, but Matsuda missed him more than anything else. Maybe it was wrong for him to weep for Kira (although it wasn’t really Kira he was weeping for), but he couldn’t shake the thought that Light should still be there, alive, acting as L in Near’s place, or at the very least working for the Japanese police as himself. He regretted Light’s death more than the Chief’s now (although it hadn’t always been that way) because at least Soichiro Yagami had died happy, had died a good man. Light hadn’t been afforded even that, and who had robbed him of it?
Matsuda had undergone more than enough nightmares where Light writhed bloody on the floor, where he was riddling his friend with bullet holes, where one or both of them was crying for forgiveness. At least he could wake up from those.
The minutes flowed by in blurs and the next thing Matsuda knew he was being guided gently to a taxi, and then he was squeezed in the backseat between Aizawa and Ide and his head hurt and so did his throat, and he was sure he was screaming but he couldn’t hear it anymore.
By the time his wailing was reduced to sniffles and weak tears, Matsuda was acutely aware of Ide’s arm around his shoulders, of Aizawa’s hand on his side, of the now-sweaty faux fur poking between his fingers. He was leaning almost entirely against Ide and he felt dizzy and ill in every possible way, and then the guilt regarding the immediate issue hit him and the guilt regarding the more overarching lamentations of his life took a back seat again.
“S-sorry,” he managed out, unsurprised to find his throat sore. “I’m sorry. I d-didn’t mean to…”
“Don’t apologize.” Ide’s voice sounded shakier than he’d heard it in a long time, and that did nothing to make Matsuda feel better. “It wasn’t your fault. I should have been more careful. I knew there was something wrong — I knew what was wrong. I was being insensitive. I should be the one apologizing.”
“You both need to stop beating yourselves up over this.” Aizawa sounded more patient than Matsuda was used to, but he was too disoriented to appreciate it; the taxi driver, at least, seemed unconcerned. Maybe they couldn’t hear the discussion taking place in their backseat. “It’s over now. Neither of you are at fault.”
Matsuda was suddenly flooded with the urge to beg for them to have the cab stop at a bar somewhere, to find something, anything to make all this go away — but they would say no if he did, they had determined this morning that alcohol was out of the question until they got back to Japan, and if they had avoided further discussion, they all had known why. He abruptly remembered Ide’s promise to get him hot chocolate; it was probably a moot point now.
“Did we do the right thing?” he asked finally.
“Of course we did.” Aizawa paused like he was checking to make sure they weren’t being listened in on before continuing. They had had this conversation before. “There’s no end that justifies the murder of millions of people. Besides, the end itself would have been a world where everyone would constantly be living in fear. It would have been miserable.”
“Do you read many dystopian novels, Touta?” Ide asked abruptly.
“… Not really.”
“I’ll buy you some tomorrow after we get hot chocolate.”